The jail has installed a new phone system that will warn all collect call recipients in English that the call is coming from a Cook County Jail inmates.
By Stefano Esposito
The Chicago Sun-Times
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COOK COUNTY, Ill. — One day last month, Maymie Anderson was in her Jefferson, Texas, home watching the “Oprah Winfrey Show” when she got the call.
A “Sgt. Thomas” was on the line from Cook County. He told Anderson, 63, there had been a “tragic accident” involving one of her family members.
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Anderson, barely able to talk, told the caller, “I have a bad heart” and quickly passed the phone to her daughter.
“I just kind of lost it,” Anderson recalled Monday. “I thought about my grandson being up there” living near Illinois.
It turns out, the caller wasn’t a policeman. He was a Cook County Jail inmate who had just snared an unsuspecting Anderson and her daughter in a phone scam. The inmate gave Anderson’s daughter a phone number to call -- digits that included *72, a call-forwarding code.
When she dialed that number, her own phone line was “hijacked,” allowing the inmate to charge countless collect calls to the Anderson home account.
“These folks are despicable, absolutely despicable,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in announcing felony charges against 20 jail inmates involved in the scam.
The inmates are accused of impersonating a police officer. Dart said the jail has installed a new phone system that should put an end to the scam, used in jails nationwide “for years,” he said.
The new system will warn all collect call recipients in English that the call is coming from a Cook County Jail inmate. Previously the inmate could choose to have the warning played in Spanish, confusing some English speakers who then accepted the calls.
Dart’s office Monday played a recording of the Oct. 30 conversation between Anderson and “Sgt. Thomas,” actually inmate Markez Ellis, a Chicago man awaiting trial for murder.
In a jail that houses, on any given day, 11,000 inmates and has some 850 public phones, it’s very difficult to monitor phone activity, Dart said. He said good police work and recent advances in technology led to the charges.
And the jail can’t deny phone privileges to detainees who are charged with a crime but are still awaiting trial, Dart said.
Victims are often lured into the scam because they receive a collect phone call from someone who sounds like a police officer delivering important news about a loved one.
“When that phone call comes at odd hours . . . and then [the victim] hears about a horrific car accident, you can imagine what’s going through these [victims’] minds,” Dart said.
Recent victims have come from all over the United States and Canada, Dart said. Investigators say the 20 accused inmates collectively charged more than $50,000 in illegal phone calls.
Anderson said she doesn’t understand how someone could be so cruel. It was several hours before she learned her grandson hadn’t been involved in an accident.
“I didn’t now what to think,” Anderson said. “I had no idea that it was bogus.”
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